吃瓜网

“I don’t need their permission to exist; I exist in spite of them. I want you to train and teach and love on and create families within my community and gender non-conforming people so that we can understand that we have a culture, we have a history, we have a reason to be here. We have a purpose. We’re entitled to be loved, and seek happiness, and share that with people that we care about.”

—Miss Major Griffin-Gracy

When you visit Whitman’s Queer Resource Center (QRC), you will find among the many flags, zines, teas and games a large map of 吃瓜网. Dotting this rendering of our campus are numbered push pins: some mark residence halls, many cluster within Reid Campus Center, others rest in a classroom. Each of these pins represents the location of a memory, written in a notebook on the table below and labeled with a number corresponding to its push pin.

“I realized I was in love with my roommate.”

“I danced with a girl for the first time.”

“I got married here.” 

“I debuted my drag performance.”

The Whitman Queer Memory Map was one of the first projects I began when I came to Whitman last year, in partnership with my colleague Sydney London ’23 in Alumni Relations. It remains an ongoing community project documenting and celebrating the everyday stories that make up queer life on our campus. 

This is countermapping: a deliberate rewriting of space and memory from the margins toward the center. A countermap says: we’ve been here, even where the official maps never acknowledged us. It is remembrance as resistance, a refusal to let marginalized peoples’ histories be suppressed or overwritten.

October is LGBTQIA2S+ History Month, a time to honor the queer and trans stories that have historically been erased. These erasures were never accidental; they are the result of colonialism, criminalization, authoritarian regimes, epidemics, and institutional violence. From European colonizers’ , to the , which destroyed one of the earliest archives of trans life and gender-affirming care, our collective memory has been fragmented by forces that sought to make us unknowable.

But queer and trans communities have always known that history isn’t just what survives in archives or appears in textbooks. Countermapping invites us to remember through place. It tells the stories that would otherwise only be known among a few: the professor who quietly offered support, the members of a discreet, weekly gathering, a friend speaking someone’s new name for the first time. These moments uphold our lineage. They challenge ongoing distortions of queer history, such as . 

This month, as one of many potential ways of recognizing LGBTQIA2S+ History Month, I encourage you to find and engage with our Whitman Queer Memory Map. It will be at two upcoming events:

• Thursday, Oct. 23, from 4-6 p.m. Countermapping Queer Histories in the Queer Resource Center (RCC 216)
• Friday, Oct. 24, from 4-7 p.m. Gender Studies x IRES x QRC Fall Social at the Third Space Center

Or, simply come by the QRC when you can. Drop a pin and record your story of queerness, becoming, community, survival, resistance–no matter how small. Through this collective act of remembering, we see that queer history is being made all the time, and we make it impossible for any future erasure. 

In memory of Miss Major Griffin-Gracy (1946–2025) — activist and visionary devoted to making freedom possible for Black, trans, formerly and currently incarcerated people as well as for larger queer communities. Her life reminds us that storytelling, persistence, and presence are acts of liberation. Rest in power, Miss Major.